By Basil Okoh
A composition by a JSS-level critic was written in response to my op-ed with the title: “2027: TINUBU LOSES IN DELTA IF SHERIFF FIELDED BY APC”. To prove himself to be a juvenile critic, the writer with the moniker Jim Derek, mentioned the name Basil Okoh 31 times in a 1620 word, two-page composition and splattered the pages with abuse, hate and contradictory assertions, completely lacking focus or understanding of what was written. I felt punished, not by the drivel he wrote, but by the effort I wasted going through the timid and juvenile thoughts espoused in the writing.
Now I understand the pain Jim Derek’s teachers went through teaching him basic constructions while in school. I also feel their relief when he dropped out of school and found work in Government House Asaba. But I will digress a little by telling you that this is actually the standard fare from the media firefighters and hagiographers of Government House, Asaba. They dispense juvenile stuff as information, dressed in fancy words to impress.
If you peel off the abuses and grandstanding, Jim Derek’s composition is actually a very short one and did not address the issues that I raised.
The contradictory statements below are excerpts, to show you how Derek’s juvenile mind is confused and confounded and they are for your consideration and utter consternation. Please bear with me:
ON TONY OBUH’s “DITO” TEAM:
“DITO is Delta Intelligentsia for Tony Obuh, formed in 2014 to scuttle the governorship ambition of Senator Dr Ifeanyi Arthur Okowa in favour of Mr Tony Obuh”.
FEW PARAGRAPHS LATER, HE WRITES:
“Basil Okoh was never alone in DITO, there were both serving and retired senior government officials and other notable technocrats, academicians and consultants assembled to craft policies and programmes for Obuh campaign and incoming government”.
So how’s this a policy to hurt Okowa’s campaign?
SELF-CONTRADICTION AND DOUBLESPEAK:
“None of the other aspirants faulted the emergence of Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, either as governorship candidate of PDP or as governor-elect in 2023, except Olorogun David Edevbie and some people who fronted for the major opposition political party. Their conspiracy theory collapsed, crashed like a pack of cards”.
Non faulted but Edevbie did. Does this uppity JSS student know what “conspiracy theory” mean?
AND NOW THIS:
To set the records straight, governor Oborevwori is not a desperate individual, his emergence as candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, was through a transparent and open process.
AND THEN THIS:
“Governor Oborevwori survived 38 lawsuits, from lower Courts of competent jurisdictions to the apex Court, the Supreme Court of Nigeria”.
You see now the pain I was made to go through?
AND THEN THE WORD SALAD:
“Basil is a man suffering from mental manipulation and/or instability that is grossly unproductive. He’s to a large extent depressed and frustrated from all sides, which has rendered him debased and irrelevant”.
I’m debased and irrelevant but Derek responds to my writing. Thank you Lord.
Remember the local play “Veronica My Daughter” from Onitsha market literature? Derek is the reincarnation of Bomber Billy.
NOW READ THIS CLOSELY:
“And it is foreseeable that APC Delta will at the appropriate time effortlessly adopt Governor Sheriff Oborevwori as sole governorship candidate in 2027 based on his monumental achievements as a pan Deltan, and performing governor of inestimable value”.
No Thanks to Derek, the final admission that Sheriff is actually working to defect to the APC proves me right and him wrong. In spite of all the verbosity and grandstanding, the urchin Derek knew all along that he was lying from every orifice in his body. So whatever he wrote before should be considered as deception and hogwash, written to obfuscate and bury evident truth.
In the end, Sheriff will be spending public money to prepare and soften the grounds for the governor of Delta state to defect to an opposition party. He is running away from the PDP he has destroyed. PDP spent over N63 billion to make him governor. Now he is to take over the APC built by others with their resources and their hard work. In the end he will destroy the two major political parties in Delta state and reduce the state to crisis.
N63 billion Delta state public money was spent on the most litigated governorship election in Nigerian history. And it was all for Sheriff, to make him governor. Now barely before his midterm, he has worked out a defection Plan to jump to another party. How much will it cost the state this time to make his defection happen? It will cost the state billions of public money and take away it’s peace. This will be the classic agbero “overthrow” that happens in every park in the state, Effurun Park, Sapele, Agbor. Has Delta become the property of a freewheeling numbskull?
Tragedy is looming and Delta citizens are standing askance waiting for violence to begin.
“PDP political family, Party is supreme, visionary leader”
These are the dumb stock phrases and clichés of government House witless writers who know next to nothing about public communication but try to cover their ignorance with catch-phrases to impress and intimidate readers. Their statements to the public are no more than noise, the hissing sounds of a leaking gas pipe. The gobbledygook they write just to impress do nothing to endear government to the people. Just warnings and threats, not to inform. Their publications neither give information nor explain issues. You see them flaunting the “big” words: “strategic communication, mantra, street smart, three-point agenda, MORE agenda, smart agenda. Empty and irritably moronic words. Delta state governments are sold to agenda that people never see or feel, not to talk of the inherent incapacity to use such propaganda slogans to mobilize for public action. Government by sloganeering to prop up decadent regimes. We just hear “Words, Words, Words”, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet muses.
Without prompting, our juvenile warrior Derek re-litigates the issues of Sheriff’s allegedly forged certificates which was settled by the Supreme Court but which still remains a thick foul smell hanging around Sheriff.
“From the issue of alleged certificates forgery to whether or not Oborevwori genuinely graduated from Ambrose Ali University Ekpoma and Delta State University Abraka to the issue of his School Certificate”.
Nobody provoked Derek to expose his masters smelly arse but the sense of guilt remains.
ON SHERIFFS PhD AND OTHER CERTIFICATES
This is the age of knowledge, not of certificates. If it not was so, everybody will buy certificates instead of going to school. Even if Sheriff hauls home all the certificates in all Ivy League Universities, it won’t prove his knowledge. Only he Sheriff, stringing three sentences together without a howler will begin to call public attention to his improvement. The constant and vexatious writing about “street smart” is an apologia for lack of knowledge arising from the absence of foundational formal education. Street smart is an admission that your governor is not schooled. The streets are for juvenile delinquents who have broken free of parental control. The streets have no rules or discipline. The streets have no learning facilities and no teachers. The only things you learn from the street are violent shakedowns; violence, brigandage and extortion which are negative and destructive to society. Street smart are exampled by Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn, loose and devoid of any control. These are the attributes you ascribe to your governor and what you keep communicating to a lawful society as the winning asset of your leader.
“DELTA IS PDP, PDP IS DELTA”
The man who popularized that phrase, Monday Igbuya, has since left the PDP and joined APC. He is no more there to “pump up” PDP. PDP has already lost half it’s membership in Delta North to APC. That dimwitted slogan does not reflect the changing political dynamics in Delta state. It does not even speak to the gravity of the political situation of PDP in Delta state. Labour Party, hitherto unknown in the state, won nearly 75% of the ballots cast in the last presidential election. The PDP governor of the state was a candidate in that election. Talk of self-deceit.
NOW MY OWN CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:
It is sheer naïveté unworthy of any adult to believe that members of APC will line the streets to welcome Sheriff into their party as their governorship candidate. Once again, he will waste state funds for self promotion and in the end, achieve nothing but destroy the political stability of the state, just as he did to PDP. He can only help cause chaos and division in APC which may perhaps become irreversible. APC members will walk away from him as the PDP members are walking away from him now.
He will inherit the ticket of a party without members while the real owners of the APC will move on, just also as DUG did in PDP. It is hard to imagine how a man of lean intelligence will hope to fool men far superior in wits and I.Q., taking what belongs to them just because he’s a governor who wields his office as a weapon of war and subterfuge.
It is only when Sheriff arrives at the party headquarters of APC that he will realize too late that he bought a chimera, that the people who sold him a political party are not the real owners of the party just as he was selling land in Osubi that was not his own. He will realize also that the owners of the party are spread in the towns and villages of Delta state and that he did not seek their consent before paying the wrong people for the governorship ticket of APC. Just as he was taking money for land that was not his own in Osubi and Orerokpe. Karma is a bitch. So he will end up buying smoke.
By creating an arrhythmic chorus line with the name Basil Okoh, Jim Derek, a cognomen adopted to hide a lack of head and skill to write, shows clearly that he is out of depth with the issues raised in my original treatise and in fact helped to provide new insights into the conspiracies still brewing in the camp of Sheriff and Government House, Asaba.
